The primary reason name selection errors are so common is that executives live in an ocean of paper. Letters, memos, reports. Swimming in the Xerox sea, it’s easy to forget that the mind works aurally. To utter a word, we first translate the letters into sounds. Which is why beginners move their lips when they read. When you were a child, you first learned to speak and then to read. And you learned to read slowly and laboriously by saying the words out loud as you forced your mind to connect the written word with the aural sound stored in the brain. By comparison, learning to speak requires much less effort than learning to read. We store sounds directly and then play them back in various combinations as our mental dexterity improves. As you grow up, you learn to translate written words into the aural language needed by the brain so rapidly that you are unaware the translation process is taking place. Then you read in the paper that 80 percent of learning takes place through the eyes. ...